This paper presents a force visualization mechanism for endoscopic surgical instruments using a Moirée fringe. This mechanism can display fringes or characters that correspond to the magnitude of a force between the surgical instruments and internal organs without the use of electronic elements, such as amplifiers and strain gauges. As this mechanism is simply attached to the surgical instruments, there is no need for additional devices in the operating room or wires to connect these devices. The structure is simple, and its fabrication is inexpensive. An example is shown with the mechanism mounted on a 10-mm forceps. We experimentally verified in vivo, using a pig, that it can display characters corresponding to the magnitude of the force, thus visually displaying the force even in endoscopic image.

A big advantage of minimally invasive surgery is the quick recovery afforded by the minimal physical injury sustained by patients. However, the operative field provided by the endoscope camera is rather narrow. This paper discusses a new broad-view camera system, which is capable of providing a wider view of the internal organs during minimally invasive surgery. This system consists of a camera unit for capturing the image and a monitor for displaying the captured image. With the use of this system, the invasiveness of the procedure does not increase, and the other specifications of current minimally invasive surgery are maintained. Furthermore, it can function as a second camera (in addition to the one attached to the endoscope) and can help assess the overall state of the target area. In this paper, we present this a newly developed camera system, which is intended for use along with the proposed system. The camera system is composed of a miniature color CMOS camera, an indwelling needle, and an extra-thin connector. The specific design of the camera unit and the method for positioning it are shown here. The performance of this camera system has been confirmed through basic and laparoscopic surgery on animals.

This paper newly proposes the active strobe imager (ASI) that can visualize the dynamic behaviors of internal organ to medical doctors within Human dynamic eye sight, so that they can get a hint for detecting the location of tumors in real time during operation. The ASI is composed of a nozzle for supplying a pulsated air jet to an internal organ, a strobe system for visualizing the dynamic behaviors, a camera for capturing the image at the moment of strobe flashing, and a monitor for displaying the dynamic motion of internal organ, respectively. Without the assistance of strobe, medical doctors can not see what is really happening in real time, since the frequency of air jet is even more than the range of human dynamic eye sight. After explaining the basic principle, we show a couple of experiments for both artificial and real human lungs. Through these experiments, we newly found that the ASI is really helpful for discovering tumors or other diseases hidden in internal organs. Movies are available in Website.